I don't think either of those are good moves. Salamence needs coverage against steel almost as much as it needs coverage against fairy, and earthquake covers steel much better than those steel attacks cover fairy, so earthquake would be the best coverage move.

1 Answer

1 vote

I've pondered this question myself. I decided to go for Steel Wing because of Iron Tail's low accuracy. By the time you can manage to hit with it, Salamence has probably already sustained vast amounts of damage from a 4x effective Ice-type move. At first, Steel Wing's lower base power may seem unappealing, but with Salamence's high Attack stat you shouldn't have to worry.

I assume sumwun is claiming Salamence needs coverage against Steel-types due to the fact that they have very high defense and that Dragon isn't very effective against them, and not because he/she mistakingly believes that Steel is super-effective against Salamence. However, they seem to have overlooked the fact that a Steel-type move offers coverage against 3/4 things that are super-effective against Salamence (one of which is 4x effective on it). In any case, Flamethrower would be a better coverage move than Earthquake because it targets Steel-type's lower Special Defense and is super-effective against it and Ice-types. Salamence also has acceptable Special Attack enough to make the move strong enough to do what it needs to.

By the way sumwun, when you answer a question you're supposed to do so by clicking the 'answer' button, not by adding a comment, this is stated in the site's rules list.

First, please don't capitalize my name. Thanks.
Second, I personally hate when people answer my questions with wrong or incomplete answers, so I almost never answer questions unless I'm completely sure the answer is correct.
Third, it doesn't matter how many Pokemon a move is super effective against if it doesn't actually do any damage. I don't know what format the salagamer person is playing, but I'll use Ubers as my example here. In Ubers, the most common fairy type would be Xerneas, so you might try to use steel wing to cover Xerneas...
252+ Atk Salamence-Mega Steel Wing vs. 72 HP / 0 Def Xerneas: 192-226 (46.7 - 54.9%) -- 63.7% chance to 2HKO
...or you might try to spam double-edge against everything, including Xerneas.
252+ Atk Aerilate Salamence-Mega Double-Edge vs. 72 HP / 0 Def Xerneas: 292-345 (71 - 83.9%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
You may have noticed that double-edge did more damage than steel wing did, despite steel wing being super effective. So if double-edge does more damage than steel wing in almost all situations, including against fairies, then what's the point in dedicating a whole move slot to steel wing?

1 - Apologies for capitalizing your name, I had no idea it would seem to be such a big deal to you.
2 - I respect your personal preference and will keep it in mind in case I ever answer one of your questions. However, I implore you to understand that not everybody may have the same preference, and although it's important for us to all respect each-other's opinions and decisions, it's also a good idea to listen to set rules when we agree to abide to them (which we did by making an account on this site). I would hate to see you get flagged, especially when you have good information to bring to the table.
3 - Yes, it is true that super-effectiveness is not the most important thing when deciding on coverage, and I admire you taking into consideration the format of which salagamer is playing -- however, we must take into the context of his/her question. salagamer did not specify that they are asking for a move that would do great damage against any number of opponents in the Uber tier of Metagaming, they simply asked which Steel-type move would be the best choice to have as coverage against a Fairy-type opponent. I do see now why you perhaps chose to answer as a comment now, because you did not know for sure what format salagamer was using. Perhaps I spoke out of turn by requesting you to answer officially before hearing your reasons, so I apologize.
I also apologize to salagamer, now that we seemed to have plagued their question with this lengthy discussion. Hopefully, they found something useful from it...

@Hellfire Taco
Is that so? I didn't know that's how the comment/answer thing worked here. I'm still relatively new to the site, so please forgive me, I know only what I have read. Well, it's always a good time to learn, so thanks for commenting too.

@sumwun
Oh, really interesting. This was cool to see, thanks for posting it! I really don't enjoy Metagaming, so I'm not 100% sure what it all is, but I think I understand it enough to know that it was the best choice. I was only answering based off of what I believe salagamer was asking, which was what was the best of the two moves he/she posted. I've actually been interested in how exactly all the calculations work in Pokemon... I wonder if I could find any reference for it when it takes into consideration all of the effort values of the attacker when calculating damage. I always EV train my Pokemon, but it'd be cool (and useful) to know more about how it works.
If I may -- where did you learn about the EV's and damage output calculations enough to know how to write what you did? I'd like to do some research, so hopefully I don't wind up in another miscommunication like this, and can answer questions better. Honestly, I'd like to thank you for pointing out something that you disagreed with -- I hate it when people lack the courage to do that. Nobody betters themselves by holding back in a discussion.